When Things Fall Apart

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought.

Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors — people who have a certain hunger to know what is true — feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that... teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it.

Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”

We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path.

Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion—not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage.

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.

Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.

Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.

In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.

The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last — that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.

Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear.

When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband... When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place... I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go.

The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable.

Through meditation, we’re able to see clearly what’s going on with our thoughts and emotions, and we can also let them go.

From this point of view, the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep.